Daily news and top headlines for broadband communications engineering and design professionals

Movie and music piracy web operations are thriving by using deceptive practices to lure legitimate advertising from companies like Comcast, Google, Microsoft, Walmart and Ford, often concealing their illicit activities so advertising brands remain unaware.

Espial and Samsung Electronics have combined the latter’s RDK-based IP set-top box and home media gateway with the latter’s STB Client, which is built using HTML 5, to provide a multi-platform environment capable of supporting a rich user experience and new service features.

Vubiquity is offering the service, called LiveVU, as a means for cable operators who are now delivering video in MPEG-2 to migrate gradually to MPEG-4 delivery by enabling them to deliver channels in both formats. Americable is the first customer.

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled that a company is not liable for inducing patent infringement if someone other than the company carries out some of the steps leading to infringement. That case plus a decision in another case put limits on so-called patent trolls.

The OTT broadcast and video streaming equipment market grew 5.6 percent worldwide last year thanks to increased spending on content delivery networks (CDNs.) On the flip side, spending on contribution encoders and VOD playout servers declined last year, according to a recent report by Infonetics Research.

While Apple was busy trumpeting its new home automation software platform yesterday, which is called HomeKit, Comcast provided an update on new features for its Xfinity Home service. Apple announced that HomeKit would give users the ability to adjust their thermostats, lock doors, control and dim lights, among other home automated features, by using the new iOS 8 on their iPads or iPhones.

Taking a page out of its residential playbook, Comcast Business is offering a dual band Wi-Fi gateway for small businesses. As part of its neighborhood Wi-Fi initiative, last year Comcast started deploying gateways with dual SSIDs, which is the same tack its taking with the new business wireless gateway.

Apple's Mac operating system will have easier ways to share and search, while the iOS software for iPhones and iPads is getting new features for keeping tabs on your health and controlling home devices. Apple is also making it easier for various devices to work together, even though the Mac and mobile systems are separate.

While online video advertising continues a very aggressive and impressive growth trajectory, some folks are starting to dig in to what exactly they are getting with those impressions, and the story is not looking quite as rosy as perhaps everyone thought. (Contributed article.)

Google is deploying 180 satellites to provide Internet access to under-served and unconnected regions in the world, according to The Wall Street Journal. The price range for the project could range from $1 billion to more than $3 billion. The report said the number of satellites could double based on final designs.

Ericsson developed Cloud Manager as a set of tools that operators can use to begin to virtualize their networks, a process that is expected to improve operational efficiency and support the ability to improve network quality, ultimately reducing operational costs. The new revision adds performance and fault management of virtual resources.

TDS Telecom has fired up its first 1-Gig service offering in Hollis, New Hampshire for less than $100 a month as part of a bundle. The 1 Gbps service, which features 400 Mbps on the upstream, came on the heels of TDS launching a 300 Mbps service on its fiber network that serves Hollis in December.

Viaplay will be providing a cloud-based search and recommendation engine from ThinkAnalytics to its subscribers in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. Through an intergration with Comcast-owned thePlatform, ThinkAnalytics is providing multi-language search and recommendation capabilities across Viaplay’s service as well as metadata capabilities.

AT&T Government Solutions, a division of AT&T that serves federal agencies, announced it had landed a $10.4 million contract with the U.S. Navy to provide VoIP services to Navy facilities across the nation. The renewed contract provides AT&T’s cloud-based VoIP enterprise 911 routing and call handling offerings to the Navy via four geographically diverse AT&T data centers.

Google's Motorola Mobility handset unit announced Friday it will shutter its North Texas factory by the end of this year, barely a year after it opened with much fanfare as the first smartphone assembly plant in the U.S. At the time, Google had explained its surprising decision by saying the location would enable it to fulfill customized, built-to-order devices and deliver them anywhere in the U.S. within five days.